I will continue to play the good F2P games (without paying a cent myself) and the great AAA games that I will gladly pay full price for.
I figure if the F2P are going to be funded by others anyway, I might as well benefit from it.
I’ll also signal to the devs that make great full featured games that this is what I want.
If the success of Baldur's Gate 3 shows that gamers don't like micro-transactions, does that mean games that sell well with micro-transactions is prove that gamers actually like them?
Just want to be clear on what the rules are for the logic here.
Lazy devs don’t understand what scaling is. They advertised this game as Steam Deck compatible which has a way weaker CPU, GPU, storage (most people are playing on an SD card), and most importantly memory bandwidth. This game runs perfectly fine on PCs with slower CPU/GPU combos than the Series S. It’s literally just laziness and knowing people will just accept their shitty excuses.
I always love when the ignorant calls other lazy for not understanding basic things about game development. They understand perfectly well what scaling is and they’re not lazy. Have you played a single second of BG3? They’re literally the opposite of lazy. You sound like a salty xbox fanboy.
Isn’t it the split screen causing the issue, I don’t think the PC version has that. To be fair, the game does play on steam deck, but you have to knock some graphics down and lock it to 30 for a stable experience. Personally I don’t think all the panic about the series s is justified, some Devs like CDPR have done amazing optimisation for it and like you say, games will be designed for less powerful PCs for a while yet based on stream surveys.
Obviously there’s a bottleneck in BG3s design and the S hardware somewhere they’re trying to solve with MS to get the game out. It’s unfortunate that it means MS miss out on a surprise hit of the year at launch, but it’s not like their players are short of an RPG to play very soon.
Not sure you can accuse Larian of being lazy. When was the last time you saw a PC game work this flawlessly from launch?
It’s the lack of RAM causing the issues apparently, rather than power. If they could cut the split screen mode from the S it would be fine, but they can’t.
Larian have disabled split screen on the Steam Deck to account for that lower power. They can’t do the same thing for the XBox S release because Microsoft demand feature parity with the X.
So drop the rendering resolution/texture quality/render distance until it runs well enough on the Series S. Aka scaling. This is basic shit that has existed forever on PC. Like I said this game runs perfectly fine on PCs with less power than the Series S.
The problem is almost certainly RAM, not computational horsepower. XSS has nearly identical CPU capability to the XSX, so that won’t be the issue. It has a much weaker GPU, but resolutions and effects can be lowered. Where the XSS cannot linearly scale from the XSX is with RAM requirements: it has much less RAM, for anything that is not predominantly using that RAM for VRAM purposes, that cannot be scaled down trivially.
That the issue is showing up with split screen is a strong auger towards the issue being RAM. For split screen the game needs to keep two world-states in memory to handle the characters not being in the exact same place. With enough work they can probably optimize the RAM usage enough to make that work, which is why they still intend to release on XSS/XSX. But they also don’t know when, because that’s a lot of work and not certain.
They can almost certainly fix that with a combination of a lower rendering distance (less stuff to load in the first place) combined with lower quality assets in split screen (every individual asset uses less memory). Again. This stuff is basic. Really you’re supposed to build for your minimum spec first and scale up from there. I guess they were more concerned with bear sex than getting their game to run on all platforms.
I’m sure the professional game developers with decades of experience will be so thankful to hear that. You should inform them right away of how “basic” the fix to their problem really is. I’m sure it’ll be news to them and work right away.
The thing about the series s is that it’s a phenomenal 1080p game console. Anything higher than that and it’s going to struggle without some kind of upscaling technology. I bought one because I don’t have a 4k tv and it just made sense. I also have a PS5, it gets more attention but I mean come on, it’s a PlayStation and it’s a damn good one, but I can’t express how impressive it is that Microsoft packed so much power into that tiny box.
They could turn the Xboxss into a streaming console, some games aren’t available on it but you can stream those games if you want for a cost of course.
It’s a big middle finger to people who bought the xboxss, but they are gonna need to get their cloud streaming numbers up to justify the expense at some point, and people are too addicted to the ms office subsidized gamepass service to switch to anything else, as long as it stays cheap.
Yeah, the series s was a great decision in the short term, but was always going to create a lot of problems as the current generation progressed. Because while it kept consoles on shelves during the initial launch and chip shortage, and pulled in people who would ordinarily balk at the cost, the promise of next Gen support for the series s was always going to come back and bite Microsoft in the ass when more games started to push the consoles limits.
In this regard, Sony was way smarter in just extending the ps4 lifespan since developers can just drop it any time without the existing user base feeling like the got scammed since the ps4 never had promises of running concurrent to the ps5 like the series s does.
It isn’t clear why here. I presume performance, in which case drop some polygons, reduce some particles, limit lighting bounces. It’s an RPG - gfx are secondary!
I’ll bet bandwidth more. Dynamic loading of assets isn’t an old technique - it’s ancient, but the more detailed everything becomes, the harder it is. Some of the textures are incredibly large in modern games dev now too. But shipping lower res versions can be prohibitive also with SSD space at a premium.
But essentially if you want to target the current generation. Build it for the S first!
Split screen open world games effectively have to be able to run two copies of the game at the same time. This isn’t a traditional split screen coop where two players are always within one “level” together, and thus all the game code can run just once for that “level”. All the physics, ai, memory, textures, all thr subsystems are running just once.
If two people can be on oppsite ends of a world, that’s two totally different sets of physics, ai, memory, textures. Everything has to happen, twice.
Basically, believe the smart person who made the game instead of dreaming up reasons you think they are wrong when they literally made the game and told you the problem.
Wow, I’ve never had such a condescending reply - even on Reddit!
The article is clearly lacking in details like you described. But did you know that we used to have open world RPGs like Balders Gate 2 run on what are now potatoes?
Here’s another hint. World state will be measured in 100s of MB. Twice means there’s still loads of gigs left to play with. The S has loads of CPU too. This will be almost entirely a look problem
You think split screen is new? You think this hasn’t been done before? You think this is the first generation of consoles to bitch about one of them?
Whinging about the S is a small brain reply to Microsoft who aren’t willing to compromise. And good for them. There is plenty of hardware in an S and devs if they want to sell more need to target it first. No use crying about a design decisions made years ago wrt the hardware envelope. Drop some shit, make it work, run some flamecharts, optimise some more
Let’s say that’s something Microsoft would even allow, it diminishes the ability to compete with the PS5. Why would I get a Series X if there’s a chance that some big game launches will have less features than other current gen platforms?
Microsoft really hamstrung this generation of consoles by releasing the S and demanding it runs feature parity with the X.
Hey guys, you should get a Series X because BG3 is coming out. Sure it will be missing features that you’ll get on the PS5 like split screen, but you guys understand we need to support the Series S and have parity between our two consoles.
So even though you spent more money on a Series X, that’s capable of running the full game that the PS5 is getting, you should just be happy that you’re getting the game at all. Don’t worry about having paid for a console that’s capable of more.
Your comment makes zero sense. The decision not to release on Xbox at all is not Microsoft’s. It’s Larian who rather sacrifice an entire hardware base for a niche feature. You obviously didn’t read the article. It’s spelled out there.
While there would be some variance in technical capabilities between consoles, feature parity between the two would remain the same. It would remain the same because Microsoft would demand it remain the same, from both its own studios and third parties.
Wow, I’m amazed on how bad you’re at grasping the basics of what I wrote.
I 👏 DID 👏 NOT 👏 WRITE 👏 ABOUT 👏 CUTTING 👏 SPLIT SCREEN 👏 FROM 👏 SERIES S 👏 ONLY 👏 BUT 👏 ALL 👏 XBOX 👏 VARIANTS 👏 SO 👏 THE 👏 GAME 👏 CAN 👏 LAUNCH 👏 AND 👏 NOT 👏 LEAVE 👏 XBOX 👏 USERS 👏 IN 👏 THE 👏 RAIN!
The article is about feature parity between Series S and Series X and not about how all Xbox variants can’t have feature disparity with PlayStation. If Larian were to cut split screen for all Xbox versions, the game could launch just fine.
Where did Microsoft or Larian say that was an option? Where did Microsoft say that they would be happy to have features cut from the X to keep parity with the S?
I pointed out how poor a business decision this would be if Microsoft would allow it. It ruins their offering for the Series X. How can it compete with the PS5 if they start allowing developers to drop features from Xbox games? The entire point of the article is that Microsoft has boxed themselves into this corner. And your suggestion isn’t a good solution.
Where did Microsoft or Larian say that was an option?
That is an option because exclusive features come to one brand all the time. Everyone with even minor insight in video game business knows that.
Where did Microsoft say that they would be happy to have features cut from the X to keep parity with the S?
It’s not about happiness, it’s about what the rules allow and since there are exclusive features on other consoles all the time, it’s obviously allowed. That’s how the Spider-Man character ended up being exclusive on the PlayStation version of Marvel’s Avengers. Golden Eye 007 has online multiplayer exclusive to Nintendo Switch. Those are well-known facts and if you don’t know them: That’s on you.
I pointed out how poor a business decision this would be if Microsoft would allow it. It ruins their offering for the Series X. How can it compete with the PS5 if they start allowing developers to drop features from Xbox games?
Yeah, you’re such a great business genius, you think not launching a game at all is better than cutting a niche feature barely anyone cares about. Yes, you totally convinced me.
I guess you gonna vote me down again because you cannot stomach that I’m right and you’re wrong.
I think you are misreading, they are refusing to launch because of the feature parity but, that’s because they are consciously deciding that split screen is a hard requirement for the game to launch, whereas with other consoles(steam deck) they just removed split screen and called it good.
The problem is that with split screen in BG3 the entire game, incl. all background calculations, need to run twice. Split screen is disabled on Steam Deck for that reason but can be enabled via command line and frame rate drops to under 10FPS: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyaeoUdc10A
Geez. I wonder what the performance is like on the PS5 in split mode. It’ll obviously have some sort of performance hit. Maybe it’ll be a drop from 60 to 30fps? Have they confirmed if the main game will be 60?
And so would Baldur’s Gate 3 when it launches on Xbox, it just takes much more effort and dev time than Series X/PS5 would. It isn’t that it is impossible, but that it is a lot of work.
forbes.com
Najnowsze